A Fall 2009 Hurford Humanities Center Student Seminar blog.

Archived entries for Student Seminar

“In one of his promises, Aldous Huxley has raised the question of who, in a place of amusement, is really being amused. With the same justice, it can be asked whom music for entertainment still entertains. Rather, it seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility. Everywhere it takes over, unnoticed, the deadly sad role that fell to it in the time and the specific situation of the silent films. It is perceived purely as background.”

UM, exsqueeze me???

— “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” by Theodor W. Adorno